Loitering With Intent (2 page)

Sir Quentin ignored her but he said to me, ‘I never deal with my correspondence until after breakfast. It’s too upsetting.’ (You must know that in those days the mail arrived at eight in the morning and people who didn’t go out to work read their letters with their breakfast, and those who did, read them on the bus.) ‘Toot upsetting.’ In the meantime Mrs Tims went to the window and said, ‘They’re dead.’ She was referring to a bowl of roses which had shed their petals on the table. She gathered up the petals and stuck them into the rose bowl, then lifted the rose bowl to carry it away. As she did so she looked at me and caught me watching her. I continued to watch the spot where she had been, as if in glaze-eyed abstraction, and perhaps, thus, I succeeded in fooling her that I hadn’t been consciously watching her at all, only looking at the spot where she stood, my thoughts on something else; perhaps I didn’t fool her, one never knows about those things. She continued to grumble about the dead roses till she left the room, looking all the more like the wife of a man I knew; Mrs Tims even walked like her.

I turned my attention to Sir Quentin, who waited for his housekeeper’s exit with his eyes half-shut, and his hands in an attitude almost of prayer, his elbows on the arm-rests of his chair, his finger-tips touching.

‘Human nature,’ said Sir Quentin, ‘is a quite extraordinary thing, I find it quite extraordinary. You know the old adage, Truth is stranger than Fiction?’

I said yes.

It was a dry sunny day of September
1949.
I remember looking towards the window where intermittent sunlight fingered the muslin curtains. My ears have a good memory. If I recall certain encounters of the past at all, or am reminded perhaps by old letters that they happened, back come flooding the aural images first and the visual second. So I remember Sir Quentin’s way of speech, his words precisely and his intonation as he said to me, ‘Miss Talbot, are you interested in what I am saying?‘

‘Oh yes. Yes, I agree that truth is stranger than fiction.’

I had thought his eyes were too shut-in on his thoughts to notice my head turning towards the window. I know that I had looked away to register within myself some instinctive thoughts.

‘I have a number of friends,’ he said, and waited for this to sink in. Dutifully now, I kept my eyes on his words.

‘Very important friends, V.I.P.s. We form an association. Do you know anything about the British laws of libel? My dear Miss Talbot, these laws are very narrow and very severe. One may not, for instance, impugn a lady’s honour, not that one would wish to were she in fact a lady, and as for stating the actual truth about one’s life which naturally involves living people, well, it is quite impossible. Do you know what we have done, we who have lived extraordinary—and I mean extra-ordinary—lives? Do you know what we have done about placing the facts on record for posterity?’

I said no.

‘We have formed an Autobiographical Association. We have all started to write our memoirs, the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And we are lodging them for seventy years in a safe place until all the living people mentioned therein shall be living no longer.’

He pointed to the handsome cabinet faintly lit by the sun filtering through the gathered muslin curtains. I longed to be outside walking in the park and chewing over Sir Quentin’s character in my mind before even finding out any more about him.

‘Documents of that sort should go into a bank vault,’ I said.

‘Good,’ said Sir Quentin in a bored way. ‘You are quite right. That is possibly the ultimate destination of our biographical reminiscences. But that is looking ahead. Now I have to tell you that my friends are largely unaccustomed to literary composition; I, who have a natural bent in that field, have taken on the direction of the endeavour. They are, of course, men and women of great distinction living full, very full, lives. One way and another these days of change and post-war. One can’t expect. Well, the thing is I’m helping them to write their memoirs which they haven’t time to do. We have friendly meetings, gatherings, get-togethers and so on. When we are better organized we shall meet at my property in Northumberland.’

Those were his words and I enjoyed them. I thought them over as I walked home through the park. They had already become part of my memoirs.

At first I supposed Sir Quentin was making a fortune out of the memoir business. The Association, as he called
it,
then comprised ten people. He gave me a bulky list of the members’ names with supporting biographical information so selective as to tell me, in fact, more about Sir Quentin than the people he described. I remember quite clearly my wonder and my joy at:

Major-General Sir George C. Beverley, Bt., C.B.E., D.S.O., formerly in that ‘crack’ regiment of the Blues and now a successful, a very successful businessman in the City and on the Continent. General Sir George is a cousin of that fascinating, that infinitely fascinating hostess, Lady Bernice ‘Bucks’ Gilbert, widow of the former chargé d’affaires in San Salvador, Sir Alfred Gilbert, K.C.M.G., C.B.E. (1919) whose portrait, executed by that famous, that illustrious, portrait painter Sir Ames Baldwin, K.B.E., hangs in the magnificent North Dining Room of Landers Place, Bedfordshire, one of the family properties of Sir Alfred’s mother, the late incomparable Comtesse Marie-Louise Torri-Gil, friend of H.M. King Zog of Albania and of Mrs Wilks who as a debutante in St Petersburg was a friend of Sir Q., the present writer, and daughter of a Captain of the Horse at the Court of the late Czar before her marriage to a British Officer, Lieutenant Wilks.

I thought it a kind of poem, and all in a moment I saw Sir Quentin, a good thirty-five years my senior as he was, in the light of a solemn infant intently constructing his wooden toy castle with its moats and turrets; and again, I thought of this piece of art, the presentation of Major-General Sir George C. Beverley and all his etceteras, under the aspect of an infinitesimal particle of crystal, say sulphur, enlarged sixty times and photographed in colour so that it looked like an elaborate butterfly or an exotic sea flower. From this first entry alone on Sir Quentin’s list, I thought of numerous artistic analogies to his operations and I realized, all in that moment, how much religious energy he had put into it.

‘You should study that list,’ Sir Quentin said.

The telephone rang and the door of the study was thrown open, both at the same time. Sir Quentin lifted the receiver and said ‘Hallo’ while his eyes turned to the door in alarm. In tottered a tall, thin and extremely aged woman with a glittering appearance, largely conveyed by her many strings of pearls on a black dress and her bright silver hair; her eyes were deeply sunk in their sockets and rather wild. Sir Quentin was meantime agitating into the phone: ‘Oh, Clotilde, my dear, what a pleasure—just one moment, Clotilde, I have a disturbance…’ The old woman advanced, her face cracked with make-up, with a scarlet gash of a smile. ‘Who’s this girl?’ she said, meaning me.

Quentin had placed his hand over the receiver. ‘Please,’ he said in an anguished hush, fluttering his other hand, ‘I am talking on the telephone to the Baronne Clotilde du Loiret.’

The old woman shrieked. I supposed she was laughing but it was difficult to tell. ‘I know who she is. You think I’m ga-ga, don’t you?’ She turned to me. ‘He think I’m ga-ga,’ she said. I noticed her fingernails, overgrown, so that they curled over the tips like talons; they were painted dark red. ‘I’m not ga-ga,’ she said.

‘Mummy!’ said old Sir Quentin.

‘What a snob he is,’ screamed the mother.

Beryl Tims turned up just then and grimly promoted the old lady’s withdrawal; Beryl glared at me as she left. Sir Quentin resumed his conversation on the phone with many apologies.

His snobbery was immense. But there was a sense in which he was far too democratic for the likes of me. He sincerely believed that talent, although not equally distributed by nature, could be later conferred by a title or acquired by inherited rank. As for the memoirs they could be written, invented, by any number of ghost writers. I suspect he really believed that the Wedgwood cup from which he daintily sipped his tea derived its value from the fact that the social system had recognized the Wedgwood family, not from the china that they had exerted themselves to make.

By the end of the first week I tad been let into the secrets of the locked cabinet in Sir Quentin’s study. It held ten unfinished manuscripts, the products of the members of the Autobiographical Association.

‘These works when completed,’ said Sir Quentin, ‘will be both valuable to the historian of the future and will set the Thames on fire. You should easily be able to rectify any lack or lapse in form, syntax, style, characterization, invention, local colour, description, dialogue, construction and other trivialities. You are to typewrite these documents under conditions of extreme secrecy, and if you succeed in giving satisfaction you may later sit in at some of our sessions and take notes.’

His aged Mummy came and went from his study whenever she could slip away from Beryl Tims. I looked forward to her interruptions as she came waving her red talons and croaking that Sir Quentin was a snob.

At first I suspected strongly that Sir Quentin himself was a social fake. But as it turned out he was all he claimed to be by way of having been to Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge; he was a member of three clubs of which I only recall White’s and the Bath, he was moreover a baronet and his refreshing Mummy was the daughter of an earl. I was right but only in part, when I accounted to myself for his snobbery, that he had decided to make a profitable profession out of these facts themselves. And indeed it crossed my mind during that first week how easily he could turn his locked-up secrets to blackmail. It was much later that I found that this was precisely what he was doing; only it wasn’t money he was interested in.

Going home at six o’clock in the golden dusk of that lovely autumn, I would walk to Oxford Street, take a bus to speakers’ Corner at Hyde Park, then cross the park to Queen’s Gate. I was fascinated by the strangeness of the job. I made no notes at all, but most nights I would work on my novel and the ideas of the day would reassemble themselves to form those two female characters which I created in
Warrender Chase,
Charlotte and Prudence. Not that Charlotte was entirely based on Beryl Tims, not by a long way. Nor was my ancient Prudence anything like a replica of Sir Quentin’s Mummy. The process by which I created my characters was instinctive, the sum of my whole experience of others and of my own potential self; and so it always has been. Sometimes I don’t actually meet a character I have created in a novel until some time after the novel has been written and published. And as for my character Warrender Chase himself, I already had him outlined and fixed, long before I saw Sir Quentin.

Now that I come to write this section of my autobiography I remember vividly, in those days when I was writing
Warrender Chase,
without any great hope of ever getting it published, but with only the excited compulsion to write it, how I walked home across the park one evening, thinking hard about my novel and Beryl Tims as a type, and I stopped in the middle of the pathway. People passed me, both ways, going home from their daily work, like myself. Whatever I had been specifically thinking about the typology of Mrs Tims went completely out of my mind. People passed me as I stood. Young men with dark suits and girls wearing hats and tailored-looking coats. The thought came to me in a most articulate way: ‘How wonderful it feels to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century.’ That I was a woman and living in the twentieth century were plain facts. That I was an artist was a conviction so strong that I never thought of doubting it then or since; and so, as I stood on the pathway in Hyde Park in that September of 1949, there were as good as three facts converging quite miraculously upon myself and I went on my way rejoicing.

I thought often of Beryl Tims, a type of woman whom I had come to identify in my mind as the English Rose. Not that they resembled English roses, far from it; but they were English roses, I felt, in their own minds. The type sickened me and I was fascinated, such being the capacity of my imagination and my need to know the utmost. Her simpering when alone with me, her acquisitive greed, already fed my poetic vigilance to the extent that I simpered somewhat myself to egg her on and I think I even exercised my own greed for her reactions by provoking them. She had admired a brooch I wore; it was my best, a painted miniature on ivory, oval, set in a copper alloy. It was an eighteenth-century brooch. The painting was the head of a young girl with her hair rustically free. Beryl Tims admired it where it sat on my lapel, for I was wearing a matching coat and skirt which was right in those days. I hated Beryl Tims as I sat having my morning coffee with her in the kitchen and she simpered about my lovely brooch. I hated her so much I took it off and gave it to her really to absolve my own hatred. But the glint in her eyes, the gasp of her big thick-lipped mouth, rewarded me. ‘Do you mean it?’ she cried.

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Don’t you like it?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Then why are you giving it away?’ she said with the nasty suspiciousness of one who perhaps had always been treated badly. She pinned the brooch on her dress. I thought that perhaps Mr Tims had given her a rough time. I said, ‘You can have it, have it with pleasure,’ and meant it. I took my coffee cup to the sink and rinsed it under the tap. Beryl Tims followed me with hers. ‘I get lipstick on the rim of my cup,’ she said. ‘Men don’t like to see lipstick on the rim of your cup and your glass, isn’t that so? And yet they like you to wear lipstick. I always get admired for the colour of my lipstick. It’s called English Rose.’

She really was very like my lover’s awful wife. Next thing she said, ‘Men like to see a bit of jewellery on a girl.’

It was always a question of what men liked when we were alone together. The second week of my job she asked me if I was going to get married.